Cultural expectations and understanding underlie intervention focus and selection. Age and developmental appropriateness. The psychological adaptation of the learner in the school and the family and community context.

In Spanish it means &quot;to be in the middle.&quot; Actually estar is a Spanish word, but Nepantla is a Nahuatal word. Arturo Morales

There are further distinctions to grasp beyond BICS and CALP. The Three Tiers of Vocabulary divides CALP further. The first Tier is basically BICS. But Tier 2 is made up of high frequency words that are used across domains in academic use. Examples of Tier Two words would be: remain, allocate, merchant. Many literate people take these words for granted. They don’t realize that they actually aren’t daily-use words. For ELL learners, they need to be anticipated, pre-taught, and taught with diect instruction Tier Three words are content area specific words. Tier Three words would be: photosynthesis, igneous, y-intercept(Beck McKeown, and Kucan, 2002)

“Bricks and Mortar words” is another way to refine our understanding of words in the CALP category. Brick words are the content bearing words. In the above sentence, Scientists, global warming, glaciers, Himalayas and melting are “brick words”. Because of is a mortar word. It connects and established a relationship between the “brick words”. Mortar words include: • Connecting words: for example, however and whereas, although• Prepositions and prepositional phrases: on, in, under, behind, between, before, behind• Academic vocabulary typically found in content area objectives, testquestions and assignments: analyze, plan, compare, evaluate(Dutro, S., &amp; Moran, C. (2003)

1) The reality is that many CLD with disabilities must learn a second language. If a child with disabilities speaks a home language other than English, she must acquire a second language to participate in the school environment. Although research does suggest that some children may acquire a second language more slowly, especially if they exhibited language difficulties in their native language (Kessler, 1984), this should not dissuade educators from assisting their students’ second language acquisition as much as possible. Therefore, the real question becomes, should the language of instruction for CLD students with disabilities be the student’s first or second language. Studies suggest that, just as for students without disabilities, a second language is best acquired from a firm and well-developed first language foundation (Perozzi, 1985; Perozzi &amp; Sanchez, 1992). This research suggests that grammatical forms are most quickly and accurately acquired in English when they have first been taught in the student’s native language. This supports a bilingual approach to special education with CLD students. 4) Educators may mistakenly identify students undergoing a “silent period” as demonstrating a lack of ability to communicate. Remember what a child has to know to be able to say even one word in his first language. Even those children who demonstrate little expressive language in the school environment bring with them a wealth of information about their native language.

2) This advice, although popular, is incorrect for several reasons. As discussed above, students will best acquire a second language if their first language is well-established. Second, asking parents who may not be able to provide an adequate language model in English to restrict the use of their more proficient language is absurd. Parents will neither be able to stimulate their child’s language development nor will they be able to communicate easily for social purposes with their child. Wong Fillmore (1991b, p. 343) makes the following poignant observation:When parents are unable to talk to their children, they cannot easily convey to them their values, beliefs, understandings, or wisdom about how to cope with their experiences. They cannot teach them about the meaning of work, or about personal responsibility, or what it means to be a moral or ethical person in a world with too many choices and too few guideposts to follow. What is lost are the bits of advice, the consejos parents should be able to offer children in their everyday interactions with them. Talk is a crucial link between parents and children: It is how parents impart their cultures to their children and enable them to become the kind of men and women they want them to be. When parents lose the means for socializing and influencing their children, rifts develop and families lose the intimacy that comes from shared beliefs and understandings.

3) Much research in language acquisition is relevant to this topic, including: Cummins’ additive Bilingualism enrichment principle, and Research on the cognitive benefits of Bilingualism.This research clearly suggests that Bilingualism is not a burden for students, and can, in fact, be a strength. Cummins’ additive bilingualism enrichment principle and the research on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism clearly suggest that bilingualism is not a burden for students. In fact, in many parts of the world, it is a common part of daily life. When fluently bilingual parents are encouraged to raise their children monolingually, as in the case of a 1995 child custody case in which Texas State District Judge, Samuel C. Kaiser equated raising the child of a bilingual mother in a Spanish-speaking home as tantamount to child abuse, beliefs about bilingualism as a cognitive deficit are reinforced. Regardless of the cognitive benefits, bilingualism is of social benefit in our global village and can only have positive outcomes when students leave school and seek employment.

Cummins identifies three forms of literacy. First, functional literacy, which he states is “a level of reading and writing that enables people to function in society…and is relative to changing societal demands” (Cummins, 2001, p. 267). The emphasis here is on skills. Most schools stop here when it comes to teaching literacy to ELL students. Next, Cummins identifies cultural literacy as the “need for shared experiences and points of reference within an interpretive community in order to adequately comprehend texts” (Cummins, 2001, p. 267). This means that ELL students need more background information to understand and interpret many texts. For example, to understand a story about American football, the student would need a point of reference about what football is, the rules involved, the traditions and roles people play. Finally, Cummins explains that critical literacy comes from Paulo Freire’s work, and “focuses on the potential of written language as a tool that encourages people to analyze the division of power and resources in their society and work to transform discriminatory structures” (Cummins, 2001, p. 267). Cummins’ point is that literacy is not culturally-neutral, nor does it operate outside the power structures of the dominant culture. In fact, even the nature of who gets to determine what level of functional literacy is adequate for ELL students is a matter of power. Those from the dominant culture get to decide to what degree someone should become literate based on the needs of the dominant society, and not necessarily on what is best for the CLD student.

http://www.educ.utas.edu.au/users/ilwebb/research/scaffolding.htmUsing lots of cooperative learning strategies that involve learners and a more knowledgeable person (expert) will assist the learners in their ZPD. . This involves the expert modeling good problem solving methods, new approaches, and encouraging the learners to use their own skills. As this continues the learners will need the experts less and less, thus increasing the learners ZPD. 2. Continual encouragement by the teacher is necessary for learners to fully develop their ZPD, and when done correctly they will need much less attention and assistance with that subject. 3. Thus learners are finding out ways to make the material their own. 4. The model demonstrates this issues with a graphic. The peach color is the area in which learners can solve problems independently, and with the assistance of more capable others they can solve problems that are in the teal colored area. Yet, there are still problems outside the area of assistance which are beyond the current capablilities of the learner to solve; hence the phrase ‘one step at a time’. (Morris, 2008) (Webb)

These are some of important facts to remember with the ZPD and its implications for teachers. It is very important to be familiar with the concept and especially with the instructional strategies mentioned on the previous slide. When used correctly learners can really benefit from the concepts that Vygotsky mentions, especially the ZPD. (Bockarie, 2002)

Vygotsky believed that when a student is at the ZPD for a particular task, providing the appropriate assistance (scaffolding) will give the student enough of a &quot;boost&quot; to achieve the task.It is important to note that if supports are left too long learners can become dependent and will not move forward, and if removed too soon incomplete understandings can result. This is a good example of how scaffolding is used with the ZPD. Notice how along the bottom there is a clear progression from doing and watching to helping then back to watching, which allows for better understanding on the part of learners to take place. This chart shows a list of the many ways in which scaffolding can be used to help learners reach their ZPD. There is a division of activities between those which are completely student or teacher regulated, and those which are more joint activities. This is a very helpful visual representation of learning strategies to create scaffolding in the ZPD. (Wilhelm, 2001)

Excerpt from the book “Seven Steps for Separating Difference and Disability” , 2010, Corwin Press

Pragmatics:The rules governing social interactions (e.g. turn taking, maintaining topic of conversation).Difference: Social responses to language are based on cultural background (e.g., comfort level in asking or responding to questions) Pauses between turns or overlaps in conversation are similar to those of peers with the same linguistic and cultural background.Disability: Social use of language or lack thereof is inappropriate (e.g., topic of lesson is rocks and the student continues to discuss events that occurred at home without saying how they relate to rocks). Syntax:The rules governing the order, grammar, and form of phrases or sentences Difference: Grammatical errors due to native language influences (e.g., student may omit initial verb in a question—You like cake? (omission of Do)). Word order in L1 may differ from that of English (e.g., in Arabic sentences are ordered verb-subject-object while Urdu sentences are ordered subject-object-verb).Disability: Grammatical structures continue to be inappropriate in both languages even after extensive instruction (e.g., student cannot produce the past tense in either Spanish or English indicating difficulty with grammatical tenses). Semantics:The rules pertaining to both the underlying and the surface meaning of phrases and sentencesDifference: A student whose native language is Korean may have difficulty using pronouns, as they do notexist in his/her native language. A student may use words from L1 in productions in L2 because of his inability or unfamiliarity of the vocabulary in L2 (e.g., “The car is muyrapido.” In this case, the student knows the concept as well as the needed structure but cannot remember the vocabulary).Disability: Student is demonstrating limited phrasing and vocabulary in both languages (e.g., his/her sentences in both languages demonstrate limited or no use of adjectives and adverbs and both languages are marked by a short length of utterance). Morphology:The rules concerning the construction of words from meaningful unitsDifference: Native speakers of Russian may not use articles as they do no exist in that language. A student whose native language is Spanish may omit the possessive (‘s’) when producing an utterance in English (e.g., “Joe crayon broke” or he will say “the crayon of Joe broke,” applying a structure that is influence by the rules of his/her L1. He/she still demonstrates understanding of the morphologic structure for possession but is demonstrating errors in structure that are directly influenced by his/her L1.)Disability: Student’s productions in both languages demonstrate a lack of the possessive form indicating that he/she has not acquired this morphologic structure by the appropriate age. Again, both languages may be marked by a short length of utterance

From CREDECenter for Research on Education, Diversity &amp; Excellence at Univ of California at Santa Cruz

This is an Individual Student Data Tracking Form. You can use this to collect and summarize individual student data. You will need to enter the goal amount and whether the goal is a percent or the total number of occurrences. The baseline data is entered on the top right side of the form by entering the date and the value for that day. Next, you will be able to enter data for the first phase of intervention on the right side of the document. Then, you can enter notes or descriptions for Phase 1. You can also enter a second phase of data and notes, if you revise the plan or change intervention. The form has embedded formulas to automatically create a graph to summarize your data. A blank copy is included in the supplemental resources.

Direct assessment is another tool that can be utilized to measure behaviors. This tool is a direct assessment of the frequency of the a behavior across settings and across time. So, looking at this data what can we tell about when Shamel has the most difficulty with negative comments to peers?

Another form of direct assessment is a duration recording. This allows you to document the length of incidents for behaviors that might not occur frequently but last for a considerable amount of time, such as tantrums.

RTI is a function of regular education that emphasizes preventinglearning difficulties before they start and eliminating the need for a student to fail beforeintervention is available.